Not a Valentine, Not a Move

A graphic now circulating puts the case in two sentences: “A vote is not a valentine, you aren’t confessing your love for the candidate. It’s a chess move for the world you want to live in.” The first sentence is true. The second gets the act wrong, and it skips the question that comes before any move.

Where it came from. The line goes back to Rebecca Solnit, writing in The Nation in 2016 to urge a vote for Hillary Clinton: “I think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine.” Any party can use it, since it treats an objection to a candidate as a lack of affection.

What truth it twists. Prudence is a virtue, but it chooses among lawful acts and cannot make an act lawful. Both of the line’s pictures define the vote by the voter’s feelings or aims. A public act means what the order that defines it says it means. A republic, Madison wrote, “derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people” (Federalist No. 39), so a vote for a ruler shares in conferring his powers. Yet a ruler’s power is the sword, and Paul forbids the sword to private men (Rom. 12:19, 13:4). No voter holds it, and none gives what he has not. The Christians tried by Pliny, a Roman governor, could have called a pinch of incense a chess move, and refused. A vote is not worship, but the principle is the same.

Where it leads. The line makes the voter the maker of his world. God cut Gideon’s army to three hundred to keep Israel from that boast: “My hand has saved me” (Judg. 7:2). Its only test, the world you want, rules out no candidate while the other side looks worse. Paul answered that reasoning in its plainest form: “Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just” (Rom. 3:8).

What it skips. By the line’s logic, abstaining is a move too. It has effects, but effects do not make an act lawful, and the abstainer claims no power he lacks. He still obeys rulers, prays for them, and speaks God’s law to them. The line asks which move to make, never by what right a man moves at all. None Gives What He Has Not answers it.

Rebecca Solnit, “The 2000 Election Unleashed Disaster on the World. We Can’t Let That Happen Again in 2016,” The Nation, 3 November 2016.

James Madison, The Federalist No. 39 (1788).

Pliny, Letters 10.96.

Scripture: New Testament, King James Version. Old Testament, Brenton’s Septuagint.

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